Tabbed browsing was one of the best things to come to web browsers. And while I am guilty of having 30+ tabs open at a time, I found an even cooler way to stay organized in Chrome with Picture in Picture Viewer. The cool thing about this extension is it allows you to dock your favorite stuff in a floating-type mobile view window. It actually works similar to the Floating YouTube Popup Video app for Android, but on your desktop and allows more than just YouTube.
I remember when Picture-n-Picture was a hyped features of TV sets back in the day, allowing you to watch two football games at one. Well, this extension is that feature for the web.
Picture in Picture (PiP) Viewer for Chrome
Launch Chrome and install the Picture in Picture Viewer extension. After it’s installed an icon will be added to the upper left corner of the screen where you can toggle it on and off.
Where this extension can really come in handy is when you want to listen to a TED talk, Sunday Night Football, or dock your Twitter feed. You can do this while still managing all of your other tabs. But before you can start using it, you’ll need to enable Chrome’s experimental Panels feature.
In the address bar type: chrome://flags/#enable-panel and hit the enable link. To find it easier, just hit Ctrl+F on your keyboard and search for panels. After enabling it, you’ll need to restart Chrome. Just click the Relaunch Now button that comes up at the bottom.
After Chrome restarts, hit the PiP icon on the page you’re on, say YouTube for example, and a small windows of the YouTube video you’re watching pops up in another open panel.
It also provides the ability to enter in other URLs fro the PiP button to open another panel.
For example, here I have an MSN page open along with YouTube, and a few tabs for different web pages.
This extension uses experimental features and can be buggy at times. For example, if you right-click one of your PiP panels, it can crash the browser. Still, this is a fun one to play with and seems like a more productive way to multitask – provided you’re not just using it for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Netflix…etc.
Speaking of viewing multiple tabs in Chrome at the same time, check out the Tab Resize and Split Screen Chrome extensions.
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